THE HOT CORNER: NPB gives 'show time' new spin

by Jim Allen (Feb 26, 2009)

Nippon Professional Baseball is taking on a mole hill as if it were
challenging Mt. Everest. This year's targets in the war on wasted time
are the seconds squandered by pitchers while the bases are empty.

No one wants to make light of NPB's desire to speed up the game,
especially after its success in 2008. But the amount of time wasted by
pitchers with no one on is insignificant.

Last year, NPB urged players to speed up inning and pitching changes
and shaved nearly five minutes off each game. Despite that success, the
games remained pitifully slow (3 hours 13 minutes in 2008) with endless
numbers of pickoff throws and trivial pitching changes. Combating these
serious dangers to the game's energy level would require changing the
game's rules. Unfortunately, NPB is not empowered to do this, so it
must wait for the next cold day in hell when Major League Baseball's
rule committee acts to restore the game's speed.

This year, NPB, under its new slogan "Let's sho time"--with sho
being the Chinese character for reduction--has decided that a pitcher
working with none on will deliver the ball within 15 seconds of the
time he receives the ball and the batter is prepared for the pitch.
Failure to do so will require umpires to call a ball.

"I think all pitchers would think the same, that this isn't
baseball," Hokkaido Nippon Ham Fighters ace Yu Darvish was quoted as
saying in The Yomiuri Shimbun. "You go to the resin bag, take a look
around and by the time you're set, you have to deliver in three
seconds."

It may not be baseball as Darvish or other pitchers envision it, but it's fair to everyone.

There is, however, unintended irony in Darvish's words. The rule
isn't baseball, since the official rules require the pitcher to deliver
within 12 seconds, not 15.

This returns us to baseball's biggest failure: a smug but perverse
pride in not altering its rules in order to preserve the game's energy
and balance.

Every other major sport occasionally alters its rules to preserve
its energy level and balance. Baseball's biggest move in this area was
the introduction of the designated hitter in 1973. The DH has its
detractors, but it was a real attempt to add energy to the game.

Otherwise, MLB and NPB do what the Japanese government often does:
simply change the interpretation of existing laws. The 12-second rule
has existed, but MLB and NPB have chosen to ignore it along with the
definition of the strike zone, the requirement to actually force the
lead runner on a double play and the prohibition against obstructing
bases.

Apologists can argue that baseball's charm is its timeless quality,
that the game is the same as the one played by their grandfathers. But
no one's grandfather ever twiddled his thumbs while the pitcher kept a
runner pinned to first base with 12 pickoff throws and countless looks
to the bag.

Baseball, which used to be a battle of speed and wits between
runners and fielders, is now a plodding war of attrition in which
managers change pitchers at the drop of a hat for little significant
gain, and overfed sluggers who can't run or field are some of the
biggest stars.

With one stroke, the rules committee could do something really
useful, such as eliminating the pernicious practice of sending in
pitchers to face one batter. Who benefits from the current tactic?
Certainly not the fans. No one pays to watch the game halt so a fringe
lefty can make an entrance, throw eight warmup pitches, four or five to
the batter and then leave the game. It seems the only one to benefit
from it are the pitchers themselves.

The same can be said for moving to reduce the number of pickoff
throws somehow. It would change the way the game is played, but unless
one likes those tedious grinds between pitcher and runner, that would
seem to be a good thing. If stolen bases become more frequent and the
game becomes faster in both the physical and temporal sense, that, too,
would be a plus.

No managers would be happy with changes that drastically alter the
way they wage their on-field wars. But without the kind of dramatic
rules that other sports adopt, baseball will never regain the energy
that made it America's pastime 140 years ago.